December 10, 2011

Boris Karloff and Aesopus

Today some more of Karloff's Caedmon Records oeuvre with a visit to Aesop, "...who created an independent class of stories about animals, so that in a few generations his name and person had become typical of that entire class of literature. In course of time, thanks to his plain, popular manner, the story of his own life was enveloped in an almost inextricable tissue of tales and traditions, which represented him as an ugly hunchback and a buffoon. In the Middle Ages these were woven together into a kind of romance."

"A Phrygian by birth, and living in the time of the Seven Sages, about 600 B.C., he is said to have been at first a slave to several masters, till Iadmon of Samos set him free. That he next lived at the court of Croesus, and being sent by him on an embassy to Delphi, was murdered by the priests there, is pure fiction. We know how Socrates, during his last days in prison, was enraged in turning the fables of Aesop into verse. The first written collection appears to have been set on foot by Demetrius of Phalerum, B.C. 900. The collections of {his} fables that have come down to us are, in part, late prose renderings of the version in choliambics by Babrius (q.v.), which still retain here and there a scrap of verse; partly products of the rhetorical schools, and therefore of very different periods and degrees of merit." (Dictionary of Classical Antiquities, Oscar Seyffert)

Aesop and Boris share among them the barnacles of accumulated legend as well as becoming virtual trademarks and exemplars of particular genres. Presented for your amusement and edification below, six short tracks from the 1967 Aesop's Fables album produced by Howard Sackler. And, to make it more seasonal, the last few moments of "The Goblins Who Stole a Sexton" lp side by Mr. Karloff as a bonus cut. Cheers.